At 3am, Professor Jonathan Jansen was on Facebook. A Free State University (UFS) student now experiencing academic life in California was on live chat with the vice-chancellor.
“Gee whizz,” he pops out. “It’s just amazing - these kids are amazing.” And Jansen should know. He’s surrounded by 3 000-odd of them at the Bloemfontein campus - and around the world. And of course, the country’s best-known educationist is also better-positioned than almost anybody on what it’s like to shape relationships out of fragile circumstances, even if others have chosen to blow that off.
This weekend, he could sit back for a moment and exhale.
It’s been announced that UFS has won the prestige World Universities’ Forum award for best practice in higher education during 2010 – an accolade which any institution would prize. It pleads for significance. It trumpets innovative curricula, and feels for the muscle of research. And these are exactly the qualities which Jansen hoped to bring to his new workplace when he took on one of the toughest jobs in higher education in the country 18 months ago.
Yet of course, at that time he couldn’t have known what would come his way and that of the university after the Reitz hostel racism incident – a story which went global.
It could have, and probably should have, torn the place apart and shattered Jansen’s hopes as rector. It did not.
As the award spells out, it is precisely the transformation at UFS which has distinguished it. There is complete racial integration now and top students are being sent abroad to learn how to be campus leaders. Academic life is in full flourish.
Young intellects are blooming, both in the lecture halls and in struggling high schools identified as partners.
Harmony, success and vitality were the World Universities’ Forum’s criteria and this weekend, when the award is collected in Hong Kong, the celebration will lift Jansen’s heart.
“One my frustrations in 2010 was that there was a complete mismatch between what you would see in some newspapers and what we were experiencing on the ground. Both English and Afrikaans newspapers occasionally had screaming headlines about us. I would read about “rasse moles” (racial harassment), which was terrible, or about “a racial war”, and we here at the university would look at that and ask: what are they talking about?
“We knew from daily experience that we were clearly going through something completely at odds with what some of the national media was portraying. So what the award does for us, among other things, is to counter the distant rumblings about the university being in trouble and reflect more accurately the huge gains that we’ve made since Reitz.
“To that extent, we are most grateful.”
The award examined institutions in their entirety and, as Jansen points out, it was made not by “some idiot”, but by senior people in higher education around the world.
“I have to say that when I took this job, I was told that everyone would be watching me, and indeed they have been. It’s become a nice thing, a wonderful way of correcting what we thought was wrong, so I’m very excited.”
Although the dark misfortunes after Reitz have undoubtedly dominated an outsider’s portrait of the university, Jansen has not been fixating on it. Not at all. Instead, he’s been occupied with carefully dismantling other barriers.
“There were great obstacles to human decency here, but also to academic excellence, and that was hard.
“We have two different ideologies: the black and English one for which transformation crudely means more black people, and the reality of Afrikaans-speaking communities, which was the opposite.
“Most often, the two did not know each other, and we got lashed on both sides.
“So it’s been a very fascinating leadership experience. We’ve had to navigate the university between these two ideologies.”
Much has happened that has barely scored a blip in the consciousness outside. For one thing, the university has cleared out its old emblem and motto with their questionable morality.
“We’ve had people say, ‘oh, that’s just terrible’, but I believe that was the right thing to do - and I say that as a Christian. We had to move away from the Calvinist vision of before, so we started the process of symbolic reparation. We had to look at the way the university named itself and one of the most important aspects of that was the emblem which, if you look at it carefully, carried very troubling images of the world of Orange, of the Voortrekker movement, only of the battles from the Afrikaner point of view.
“Our argument has always been that those symbols are indeed important to some of our people, but others find them offensive. We have to have inclusive symbols, while understanding that we could not completely undermine that sense of continuity with the past. We are, after all, a university that served a part of our population in a particular way for a long time.
“The senate and council approved the changes, and now I think we have a more embracing set of symbols. For example, we no longer refer to God in the motto. Now we have a reference to truth, which is a transcendent symbol, even for those who don’t believe in anything. That reference is about both spiritual and scientific truth, but this is only in addition to the real, hard work being done on the ground in terms of material reparations.”
A deeply personal advantage for Jansen was his experience at the University of Pretoria, another Afrikaans institution whose culture prepared him to some extent for what he would find at Free State. If he didn’t realise the value of the time he spent at Tuks before, he has felt it fully on over the past 18 months.
He admits with a laugh, “my friends always say I’m bit of a Pollyanna. But I’ve never before enjoyed my work so much. So in a way it’s a real pity that those four Reitz students allowed many people to make a judgment about a whole place like this. That does not mean there weren’t serious problems at the institutional level - because there were. We just didn’t appreciate the over-emphasis.”
Jansen worships his leadership team. Trust between them is everything. “We had to be firm and decisive about stuff that was wrong. We had to be able to go to the council and say, look, we’ve got to face up to the fact that the curriculum does not reflect a democratic and academically advanced view of the world and this is what we can do if we put our heads together. We felt we all had to get behind a vision and revise our thinking, so we asked the senate, well, is this something you can live with - and they could.”
His opinion now is that it is much easier to transform an historically Afrikaans university than an English one.
“There can be the illusion of innocence at some of those institutions, maybe even some sense of self-satisfaction, and maybe a view that if anybody has to change, it’s the people on the other side. So for me it’s such a fantastic thing to be at the University of the Free State. Not once have I had to convince a colleague that something was the right thing by moving heaven and Earth. Everybody just does it. We’re all very much into joy and optimism here.
“If one thing made me spiritual again, it’s been this. And I believe what has happened here would not have been possible on only human intervention.”
There are some big fights behind Jansen now, such as raising the academic standard for admission.
“That meant we had 23 percent more applications this year than last year, and this is what happens when people sense you are not selling a cheap product. That meant creating an academic core curriculum for all undergraduates that had a broader intellectual basis for being a scholar.
“We cheer every time parents want to know the value of a qualification from our university. We are comfortable to say we know it will now stand their children in good stead. We don’t want students who’ve just scraped through matric, so we wrote to every parent of a prospective student and said, we need your support.
“The average parent knows when they are being sold short and we’re definitely not doing that.”
Jansen is very taken by the decision for him to teach again this year as one of the academics giving a compulsory course on 10 big life questions. That’s part of the plot to allow undergraduates to think much more broadly.
He’s also immersing himself in fresh academic conversations which are changing and improving with the appointments of new professors.
“When I finished my PhD at Stanford, I had absolutely nobody to mentor me, to tell me not to waste my time by writing for the wrong journals and so on. South Africa’s got a major problem with its professoriate, with especially white men leaving the system.
“What we need to do now is take every really promising young academic, who has more than the basic smarts, and mentor them.
“We want our colleagues out there in the world to sense that something exciting is happening here and that they should want to be part of it. So we’ve had to re-examine the intellectual architecture we had – issues that are evident in all Afrikaans heritage institutions.
“For example, physical science has always been extremely strong at those universities, so we knew we didn’t have to fiddle too much there, but humanities and education were not as well-disciplined, being more susceptible to the apartheid project, so we needed to get in new professors. We’ve been very lucky with the radical thinkers we’ve found.”
Yet his Facebook chat with the student in California distinguishes the friendships Jansen cherishes most. His own picture on the social networking site is hilariously down to earth.
“If you took students away, it would kill my spirit. I have one sleeping in my house. On Friday, a whole bunch is coming for a braai. When we open, I’ll be part of the guard of honour. I’m in and out of their homes. I’ll be dishing ice-cream with my colleagues at Rag. My own daughter, who is 19, is here as a student and she doesn’t want to leave Bloemfontein even in the holidays. People are always knocking on the door of our home, making my wife and I dinner and bringing us flowers. They’re concerned about making sure we’re doing well. So we’re really trying our best to make that happen.” - Pretoria News